Wind Waker Wii U developed in just six months

The Wii U re-release of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker took just six months to develop, according to series producer Eiji Aonuma.

In a 4Gamer interview translated by Siliconera, Aonuma said the GameCube port was hard work despite the relatively short development cycle.

“Development was still difficult. You had to consider the difference in hardware at the time,” he said.

“Additionally there is a technique known as toon shading, which gives the game a very animated look. At that time, the technique was established, but had not been used before by our staff, everyone had to do everything by hand.”

There were other problems; the Wii U version is in widescreen format, which meant some previously obscured characters were made visible on-screen at inappropriate times and had to be manually edited out.

“For dramatic purposes, we would have characters we didn’t want in the frame, out of sight, but on the 16:9 ratio, you could still see those characters,” the producer said.